Friday Afternoon Roundup - Over the Cliff

OF FISCAL CLIFFS

Here's how the game is played. No matter what happens with the fiscal cliff negotiations the Republicans will get blamed. There is no scenario, perhaps short of agreeing to Obama's proposal to give him the power to borrow unlimited amounts of money, raise taxes and do the same crap that got us into a sixteen trillion dollar hole to begin with, and then maybe appoint him king, that will change that. And even that brief moment of praise will last about six seconds.

Republicans are playing into the hands of the enemy by emphasizing the fiscal cliff negotiations. There is very little to negotiate here. Obama, fresh off a stolen election, carved out over the bodies of hurricane victims, is daring Republicans to say no to him. And a dispirited Republican establishment is still feeling beaten and too willing to give in.

There are two scenarios here. Either Obama is bluffing or he isn't. And it doesn't really matter which one is correct. The crisis is being exploited with nonsense about fixing the giant hole in the economy created by Obama, by raising taxes on the rich. Even though the tax hikes wouldn't even begin to cover a month of spending.

The fiscal cliff is a strategic crisis weapon, but it's the wrong crisis for Republicans to focus on. The crisis here is spending, not the fiscal cliff. The crisis is the viability of Social Security. The crisis is in the personal things that people care about. The crisis is not how to find ways to let politicians spend more money.



FOUR SIMPLE QUESTIONS

1. How can a place with no elected officials be considered a state?

2. How can Palestine be a state if it’s actually two mutually hostile states run by two different governments?

3. How can a place that is almost entirely subsidized by foreign aid qualify for statehood?

4. How can a place that has made no progress in 20 years qualify for statehood?

...from 4 Questions for Anyone Who Supports a Palestinian State





WHY HAMAS IS STILL AROUND

Short answer, because Israel isn't allowed to kill them or even deport them.

Twenty years ago, on December 1992, Israeli forces responded to Hamas atrocities by arresting over a thousand Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists and deporting 415 of them into Lebanon.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 799 which “strongly” condemned the deportation of “hundreds of Palestinian civilians” and expressed “its firm opposition to any such deportation by Israel”. It further demanded that Israel “ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied territories of all those deported.” United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for taking “whatever measures are necessary” to compel Israel to take back the terrorists.

In a story headlined, “Deporting the Hope for Peace”, Newsweek sympathetically described the Hamas terrorists “shivering in the cold.” The New York Times reached for the poetic describing the hillside they were camped out on as “desolate”; though it’s hard to see how desolate it could have been when it was surrounded by reporters. The Christian Science Monitor wrote of them huddling “under heavy rain.” The media spent more time providing weather updates from Lebanon than it did covering the local weather.

Despite the truckloads of supplies, a few days later Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the future leader of Hamas, described by the Associated Press only as a Gaza physician, demanded that the UN and the Red Cross bring them food, water and fuel because they were already starving and forced to fast to stay alive. The media breathlessly reported that the temperature had dropped to below freezing and the men were on the verge of death.

In reality, the deported terrorists had food and water brought in from local villages and their “desolate hillside” would become an enclave of television sets, fax machines, copy machines, cell phones, a fridge filled with soda and a satellite dish beaming Iranian television shows to  them. Rantissi, who would later boast, “By Allah, we will not leave one Jew alive in Palestine” was living better than many of his victims.

One Associated Press story described a deportee eating a breakfast of jam, cheese and bread or beans and chickpeas with lemon sauce, and then a lunch of tuna fish or sardines, and then complaining, “I’m so sick of this food. I eat only to stay alive.”

That was 20 years ago. And today Hamas is still chowing down and whining that Gaza is starving. They did an excellent job of learning the lesson that the media taught them. Always play the victim.



THE MUSLIM WORLD IS TRULY MODERNIZING

Saudi Offers “Castrated African Slave” for Sale on Facebook




ROMNEY SOLIDLY WON THE ORTHODOX JEWISH VOTE

There have been false claims made by Jewish liberals that Obama won or broke even with the Orthodox vote. I've seen Beachwood, OH, repeatedly, and misleadingly, brought up.

But the numbers from the heartland of American Orthodox Judaism in New York City are not even close. Instead you see isles of blue (Romney votes) trapped inside a sea of a red (Obama votes) across Orthodox parts of Brooklyn.

Here's what Williamsburg looks like.

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT THE ASIAN VOTE

In my piece on the Asian vote, I take a closer look at what happened to the Asian vote. And the answer appears to be, a sizable growth in Chinese and Indian immigrants, who are very closely linked to the Democratic Party.


 
IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Egypt Sentences Mo Filmmaker to Death, Obama Sentenced Him to Only One Year

Truly we live in a moderate Muslim country. One year in the Federal pen for insulting Islam is pretty mild compared to a death sentence.

Sure we criticize Obama a lot and often justly. But it’s important that we also show our appreciation for living in a country that Obama described as “one of the largest Muslim nations in the world” where people who offend Islamic theocracy get sentenced to a mere one year in prison.

Obama may be a terrible leader by American standards, but compared to Assad, Erdogan, Morsi, Ahmadinejad and Karzai, he’s really not so bad.

IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT II

Obama Considering Directly Arming Syrian Al Qaeda

School District with %58 Graduation Rate, 50 Million Budget Deficit Spent 2.7 Million on Plastic Surgery for Teachers

At one point the school board offered to cancel 100 teacher layoffs if the union would drop the cosmetic surgery program for a year, according to The Atlantic. The union declined the offer.

AP Under Attack for Removing Islamophobia, Homophobia from Stylebook

Islamic Foundation Pays Indonesian Parents 9 Dollars to Mutilate their Daughters’ Genitals

Israeli Mother-of-Four Fights off Terrorist with Martial Arts

What most upsets David Carr at the New York Times is the idea of a woman fighting back when members of the news media hit them. As a member of the news media who has hit a few women in his time, Carr would consider this an Israeli action that is truly over the line.

Obama Donors Got $21,000 in Government Money for Every $1 They Gave

British Court Convicts Woman of Racism for Calling Woman from New Zealand “Australian”

How Obama’s FEMA Criminally Botched the Hurricane Recovery Effort

 "I asked, ‘Why haven’t you been sent out?’” he says. “Then he just lays the story on me, tells me about all the personnel they have out there, more than 100 ambulances, two paramedics per ambulance, everybody waiting for marching orders.”

Horrified, the logistical worker offered to help transport them to a place where they could be useful.

“He said they couldn’t do it because FEMA had them all under contract, and they couldn’t go out without FEMA’s say-so.

MURDERING THE ECONOMY, ONE JOB AT A TIME

Over-educated tourists often make a pilgrimage to Cannery Row, lined with rows of defunct canneries, but named after John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row. The novel with its eccentric characters exists, the real life canneries are gone.

Not only have the sardine canneries of Cannery Row closed, but little noticed, the last sardine cannery in America closed this year, with the end of Stinson Seafood in Eastern Maine.

Now Obama has succeeded in shutting down the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the last oyster cannery in California. 

Hope, change and hopelessness. The Death of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company





BIG BAD RED BOMB

I have two articles this week on Front Page about Oliver Stone's propaganda Showtime series.

The Untold History of the Left

There is a reason why old terrorists become academics. On the college campus there is no historical revisionism of the left so discredited that it cannot find credulous audiences among the young. And there is no one better than Oliver Stone for the job.

Stone’s specialty is turning left-wing propaganda into pop entertainment. From “Platoon” to “Born on the Fourth of July” to “JFK” to “Nixon” to “W,” Oliver Stone has played Andy Warhol to the red soup companies of men like Robert Scheer. And pop entertainment, whether it’s the Obama campaign or Oliver Stone’s Showtime series, is a vital weapon in winning the hearts and minds of a generation that is overeducated but lacks the ability to burst its own intellectual bubble.

And... The Atom Bomb and the Truth Bomb

Stone’s untold history isn’t just revisionist; it’s seventy-year-old revisionism from a regime and an ideology every bit as ugly as Nazism. It’s the revisionist history of the aggressor power in the Cold War looking to retroactively justify its aggression against the free world by accusing the leading nation of the free world, that had fed and provided for its soldiers and civilians, of conspiring against it.

Like William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow, all this edifice of bad history depends on Henry Wallace, FDR’s Vice President, and at the time, a Soviet dupe. Stone is obsessed with imagining a different policy that would have emerged if Wallace, not Truman, had become president. There is just one little problem with that. Wallace, despite being fooled by the Soviet Union, did eventually figure out the truth.

In 1952, Wallace wrote an article titled, “Where I Was Wrong” in which he said that, “Before 1949 I thought Russia really wanted and needed peace. After 1949 I became more and more disgusted with the Soviet methods and finally became convinced that the Politburo wanted the cold war continued even at the peril of accidentally provoking a hot war.

“As I look back over the past 10 years I now feel that my greatest mistake was in not denouncing the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia in February of 1948… my analysis failed to take into account the ruthless nature of Russian-trained Communists whose sole objective was to make Czechoslovakia completely subservient to Moscow.”

Henry Wallace had learned from his mistakes. Sixty years later, Oliver Stone still has not.

And Wallace's candidate of choice was Eisenhower. So much for Stone's Wallacian utopia in which America lived in idyllic peace and friendship with the USSR.




WE ARE ALL NAZIS NOW


We are all Socialists now. We are all Nazis now. At least those of us who vote monstrous systems like this into power and then look away from the atrocities that our governments commit.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

IF ONLY HE HAD BEEN A GOOD LAD...

That teen’s first mistake was throwing a ham at a mosque. If he had done something respectable like smashing the windows of a Jewish shop while chanting “Free Gaza” then the judge would have hailed him as an idealistic model to the nation’s youth. If he had only groomed young girls from broken homes for sex, the way so many mosque worshipers do, then the police would have looked the other way. But sadly he chose to commit a truly unpardonable act for which there can be no possible excuse. He hammed up a mosque. He offended Muslims.

British Police Arrest Teen Who Threw Ham at Mosque, Osama Bin Laden’s Right Hand Man Still Free in London




Susan Rice, Incompetent or a Liar?

This is not a good position to take if you want an upgrade to Secretary of State. Rice’s entire defense is that her understanding of what happened in Benghazi was so crippled by the talking points that she was unable to understand what was going on. Is this supposed to be an argument for making her Secretary of State?


How the Muslim Brotherhood Drove Out the Jews of Aleppo, Syria

In Aleppo, Syria, the Jewish community was devastated by a mob led by the Muslim Brotherhood. At least 150 homes, 50 shops, all 18 synagogues, five schools, an orphanage and a youth club were destroyed. Many people were killed, but the exact figure is not known. Over half the city’s 10,000 Jews fled into Turkey, Lebanon and Israel.

How Chicago’s Two Worst Congressmen Gave Us Eight Years of the Worst Man in the White House

Reynolds had been elected to the House in 1992 succeeding Democrat Gus Savage, who’d been condemned by the House Ethics Committees over allegations of sexual misconduct with a Peace Corps volunteer during an official visit to Zaire.

Savage made racist and anti-Semitic statements against both white and Jewish people. Savage once gave a speech in which he listed the names of all of the Jewish donors living outside of the Chicago area who donated money to his opponent. This led to a backlash, to which Savage responded that only white people could be racist.

Savage’s excuse for trying to rape a Peace Corps worker? You guessed it. Racism!

Savage denied the allegations and blamed them on the “racist press.” The Savage – Reynolds election was good clean Chicago fun.

Savage claimed that “racist Jews” were donating to Reynolds, while Reynolds claimed that Savage was involved in a drive-by shooting that injured him.

During the 1994 House campaign, Reynolds was indicted for sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse. The married congressman had developed an attraction to a 16-year-old female constituent.

Reynolds denied the charges, said they were racially-motivated, continued his second House campaign and, naturally, was easily reelected in November 1994.

Chicago. Would it really be so bad if the earth opened up and swallowed it whole?




TAX-FAN WARREN BUFFETT OWES 1 BILLION IN BACK TAXES

Come on guys, you don't think an Obama supporter would actually pay his taxes. That's for little people.

There are are two recent cases where Warren has done everything possible to AVOID paying taxes that he actually owes. The first case involved a 14-year fight over the dividend-received deduction that was finally settled with the IRS in 2005. The second case is still pending after 10 years in which he owes just over $1 BILLION in back taxes. 

A billion here, a billion there and soon you're shilling for Obama.




A Letter to His Unborn Child

When they refuse to treat you, a Jew, as an ordinary person, you shall become extraordinary. When they treat you, an Israeli, as the exception to the rule, you shall become exceptional. Where I shed the rags of the Diaspora, you will wear the robe of kings. Where I was “the return,” you are “the renaissance.” צהייל will be emblazoned on your chest, where there was once a star. You will cry at the sight of Zion, where we once cried to return. You will speak the tongue of the prophets, rather than the language of the exile. (Your heroes will be legends from the land, rather than stars from the screen.) You, my child, will be the first of our line to be born in the Land of our Fathers...

from Times of Israel via Boker Tov Boulder





IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE?

What is far, far stranger—and really is a surprise—is that 27% of Republicans or Republican-leaners also had a positive attitude toward socialism.

The only explanation I can think of—other than that the world has gone mad—is that a lot of people are unaware of what the terms “Republican” and “socialism” mean.

... or alternatively they are very aware of what it means. Sure ignorance is a convenient explanation, but it's dangerous to prematurely rule out malice.



THE RACE TO JERUSALEM

Now he has started clearing the way to make good use of that prize.  Morsi is on the move.  He is moving very quickly to consolidate power, and position Egypt as a force to be reckoned with in the “race to Jerusalem.”  No longer a sleepy, despotic backwater, Egypt is now ready to play on the same field as Iran and Turkey.  We can expect Morsi to play off Turkey and Iran, remaining on good terms with both as he will seek to do with the US and Europe.  It won’t be time for a “break” with anyone until Morsi has acquired an advantageous position for inducing the fall of Jerusalem – the denouement sought eagerly by the Muslim Brotherhood, and hollered about often by Morsi himself.

...from J.E. Dyer at Optimistic Conservative. There's a New Pharaoh in Town






WHAT THEY WON'T TEACH YOU ABOUT THE "PALESTINIAN" REFUGEE CRISIS IN SCHOOL.

Lebanon

Around half of the 400,000 refugees live in camps, deprived of many rights. Refugees don't have any property rights, no access to the Lebanese healthcare system and there are certain restrictions on jobs we are allowed to do.




Also, FYI, Lebanon naturalized more than 100,000 Palestinian Christians and Shiites. Second, who do you think was funding the militarization of the PLO? THE ARAB GOVERNMENTS, whether it's Saudi Arabia or Iraq or some other Arab country.



Kuwait

Kuwait expelled more than 450,000 Palestinians when Arafat declared his support for Saddam during the Gulf war.


Syria

Surprisingly, refugees there are treated quite well, almost like a citizen. Although this is changing and the Palestinians are being forced to choose sides in the Syrian uprising.


Iraq

Palestinians enjoyed full rights under Saddam's reign, however after the 2003 war they were severely targeted with discrimination or killings and the majority fled the country.


Egypt

You can read this report here. Not only are they discriminated against (no free education) but they receive no UN assistance whatsoever. If they go out of the country for more than 6 months, their residency permit might be revoked. Imagine being born and living in a country your whole life and needing to renew your residency permit every couple of years.


Jordan

It's the only country that naturalized Palestinians after the annexation of the West Bank, perhaps because they needed the population back then.

...
Moral of the story: Israel naturalized over 1.5 million Palestinians. They enjoy full citizen rights and many of them would remain in Israel even if a Palestinian state is established.